Poor USA: What a choice!

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By Johan Galtung

The Occupy Movement is a sign of US sanity.  Leaderless makes it less vulnerable, immensely consciousness-raising, not insisting on any one single analysis or remedy–for the time being.  People so concerned that they sacrifice some personal comfort–gaining togetherness and a sense of meaning, a gift for a democracy.

And what a sign of US insanity their touch with authority was: no leading politicians eager to preach or learn or both, but tear gas, pepper spray, evictions.  In the 1960’s Vietnam era, Sec. of Defense Robert McNamara ultimately left his office to talk sense into demonstrators.  It worked-the other way around.  That the social worker from Chicago, Obama, did not, is a shame.Read More »

The Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal: Bush and Blair guilty

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By Richard Falk

This post is modified version of a text published by Al Jazeera a few days ago. It is a sequel to the piece entitled “Toward a Jurisprudence of Conscience,” and will be followed by an assessment of the Russell Tribunal on Palestine session in Cape Town, South Africa investigating the allegations that Israel is guilty of imposing apartheid on the Palestinian people, considered by the Rome Treaty framework of the International Criminal Court to be a crime against humanity.

Criminal Justice in Kuala Lumpur

In Kuala Lumpur, after two years of investigation by the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Commission (KLWCC), a tribunal (Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal or KLWCT) consisting of five judges with judicial and academic backgrounds reached a unanimous verdict that found George W. Bush and Tony Blair guilty of crimes against peace, crimes against humanity, and genocide as a result of initiating the Iraq War in 2003, and in the course of maintaining the subsequent occupation. Read More »

Will China attack India again, and is India ready?

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By Shastri Ramachandaran

During my time in Beijing, the days on which India appeared in China’s English dailies or TV were few and far between. Even bilateral exchanges, ministerial visits and official cultural events didn’t make the kind of splash it does in India.

India figures prominently in the Chinese media when the state, party or government wants to send messages without the official stamp. In contrast, there’s much more of China in the Indian media, which is more preoccupied — obsessed even — with China.Read More »

Terryfying blockage in nuclear disarmament

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By Jonathan Power

Some of us believed that at the end of the Cold War in 1991 American and Soviet nuclear rockets would be left to rust and rot in their silos. Indeed, we actually saw the Ukraine, where the Soviets made most of their rockets and based many, calling in American engineers to help dismantle them. Moreover, Ukraine decided to forsake nuclear power status- for which the world should give more praise than it does.Read More »

The 2011 Nobel Peace Prize

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By Jan Oberg

Congratulations to the three staunch women!
And then there is the positive and the negative.

Positive:
Women, non-violence, Africa and that the prize was not once again given to war-makers and -criminals. Also, that it was not – as rumoured – awarded the EU.

Negative:
Focus on human rights rather than anti-militarism as embedded in Nobel’s will, two of the women have very strong ties to the United States and are already pelted with awards, there and elsewhere; once again mainly to a politician (who by the way has invited the U.S. to establish its African Military Command in her country) rather than to researchers or people who have had the civil courage to criticise the United States and/or the West in general.It seems unbelievable to me that they have – this very year – avoided Tunisia and Egypt as well as (once again) people like Daniel Ellsberg, Richard Falk, Johan Galtung, Gene Sharp and many others who meet Nobel’s criteria much more clearly.

Read Fredrik Heffermehl’s path-breaking analysis, Nobel’s Will the website of which is here.

Three crises – Three ideas

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By Johan Galtung

Speech delivered at the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland on 1 Dec  2011

Your Excellencies,

We are celebrating the 50th anniversary of NAM, the Nonaligned Movement; a great success.  They were not party to the madness of NATO-WTO (Warsaw Treaty Organization) confrontation and arms race, even nuclear. NAM was headed by two country triads, India-Indonesia-Yugoslavia and Finland-Sweden-Austria, and two high quality leader triads, Nehru-Soekarno-Tito and Kekkonen-Palme-Kreisky.  Their in-between roles gave the world some normalcy in the madness.  Much needed for West-Islam today; but that quality leadership is missing.Read More »

Arab revolutions and the power of nonviolent action

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By Stephen Zunes

While sitting in a Cairo café just a couple blocks from Tahrir Square recently, I couldn’t help but notice the television in the corner broadcasting the evening news. Traditionally, TV news in Egypt and other Arab countries has consisted of the president (or king) giving a speech, greeting a foreign visitor, visiting a factory, or engaging in some other official function. This evening, however, the news was about a labor strike in Alexandria, relatives of those killed during the February revolution protesting outside the Interior Ministry, and ongoing developments in the pro-democracy struggles in Yemen and Syria.Read More »

Taming the financial monster – or Rosa Parks of today

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By Jonathan Power

Every so often, but not very often, the tectonic plates in society visibly move. In the last century it was the impact of the Great Recession closely followed by a second massive war in a century that pushed both the victorious and the losers in the direction of a welfare state, albeit the Europeans, Canadians and Japanese moved at a much faster rate than the Americans.

If Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany is right and the present financial crisis is the worst upheaval since then, perhaps we are on the cusp of a major change in the governance of not just Europe, Canada and Japan but of the semi-isolationist US as well. The occupied streets and squares of some major cities suggest it. Never before in my memory have protestors gained such support from non-demonstrators. The liberals and social democrats have supported them, but so have the centrists and even some on the right.Read More »

On (Im)Balance and Credibility in America: Israel/Palestine

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By Richard Falk

I could not begin to count the number of times friends, and adversaries, have give me the following general line of advice: your views on Israel/Palestine would gain a much wider hearing if they showed more sympathy for Israel’s position and concerns, that is, if they were more ‘balanced.’ Especially on this set of issues, I have always found such advice wildly off the mark for two main reasons.Read More »

The Arab Revolt – What’s next?

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By Johan Galtung

It changes character, like in quantum mechanics, just by watching.  The French revolution did that in the late 1780s-early 1790s.  However, spring is gone, revolt is in, but so far not revolution.  There are layers of rulers and layers of opposition.  Unveiling has started.

If seeds from a winter suicide in Tunisia sprouted buds in early spring, then they must have fallen on fertile soil.  Events turn into processes when “stability” is unstable, as huge power and wealth gaps are.  The trick in the US is to make a person believe in individual mobility; “if you don’t make it that is your fault”. Others see it as a relation: by taking power/wealth from us, they became powerful and rich and we remained powerless and poor.  The former is individualist and person-oriented, the latter collectivist and system-oriented.  See it that way and revolts follow, like Tahrir Square, like Wall Street.  Nevertheless, some resources are needed.Read More »